Friday, November 6, 2009

Abomination of Unnecessarily Augmented Composition Monikers

My glorious and storied career teaching high school English lasted a single blissful semester before I ran screaming into the wilderness in the face of the near-illiteracy that is the modern American teen. By far the single most compelling argument for widespread forced sterilization of the next generation was the god forsaken overwriting. English students of the world, tattoo this backwards on your foreheads and stare at it in the mirror every morning: stringing together a bunch of big words you really don’t understand does not make you sound smart. The opposite, in fact. Unfortunately, big wordism is a pestilence that carbon dates pretty much to the birth of grindcore. Hell, Anal Cunt pitch perfectly parodied it way back in the mists of time known as 1993 with the brilliant “Abomination of Unnecessarily Augmented Composition Monikers.” Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation are by no means the first – or even worst – offenders.

From the band name right through album title The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry, Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky (yes, I know that’s a Burroughs reference, and that’s not an excuse) seem determined to beat us over the head with both death metal and their word of the day calendars. Word salad fare “Automated Oration and the Abolition of Silence” and “Retrograde and the Annointed” rapes and pillages the more mercifully titled “Cattle,” “Agenda” and “Despot”

I still don’t even know how I’m supposed to pronounce Noisear and then they compound the problem by slinging their $5 words at me too. While the art for album Pyroclastic Annhiallation partially made more sense when I learned about lava flows, the horribly mangled Annhiallation still leaves me stumped. And following in the path of Carcass – by far one of the worst poorly understood big word offenders – make my head go all Vesuvius with tortuous, torturous brain teasers like "Falsified Monetary Mitigation,” “Endless Struggle with the Invariable Imminence” and “Ineffably Inebriated.”

Magrudergrind are about as blue collar and unpretentious a grind band as you’re gonna get. However, they must have invested in a new copy of the OED with the money Willowtip waved under their noses when penning the songs for their eponymous full length. Along side easy to digest morsels like “Heretics,” “Bridge Burner,” and meta-grind joke “Built to Blast,” Magrudergrind gotta show off their erudition on “Abuse of Philanthropic Self Gain.” I dare you to diagram that sentence and tell me what it means.

Pete Pontikoff is an awesome guy who has always had a lot to say every time I’ve hit him up on a topic, but there’s no denying the man spewed a mouthful whenever he stepped to a mic for Benumb, Agenda of Swine or a phone-core contribution to Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Just sometimes I wish I knew what dude was actually trying to say with sentence-length constructions like “Anatomy of Social Issues: Problem + Contribution vs. Solution.”

While it would be easy to pin all of this on the notoriously verbose Napalm Death or Carcass, who pretty much split the credit for most of grind’s tropes – for ill or for better – neither consistently abused the dictionary with as little regard as eco-grinders Exit-13. Pick any song at random and you’re going to chew off a mouthful of polysyllabic folderol meant to dress up a fairly simple lyrical conceit. Why waste the morphemes on “Facilitate the Emancipation of Your Mummified Mentality” when “Free Your Mind” would be some much simpler. C'mon it worked for En Vogue. Ditto “Societally Provoked Genocidal Contemplation,” which could have been reduced to “Society Makes Me Want to Kill You.” That’s nearly 33 percent fewer letters, which I’m sure has to save money when you’re running a record label. As bad as those are, “Self Misunderstood Cerbral Masturbation” and “Anthropocentric Ecocidal Conundrum” are downright hermetically abtuse.